1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a document management apparatus, method, and medium for managing an electronic document.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, document management systems have been widely used to share an electronic document between a plurality of users or save it for a long term. The document management system generally classifies and manages documents using a hierarchical structure of “folders” or “directories” which are document containers. For example, folders are commonly created for respective projects or organizations to classify documents.
As various kinds of documents are saved, a user may want to completely renew the classification system and rearrange documents. In this case, the user often takes the following procedure as one of popular methods. First, the user changes the name of a top folder to execute rearrangement. Then, he newly creates a blank folder with the original name on the same layer as that of the renamed folder. While creating a folder of a new classification, he moves a document from the renamed folder to the newly created folder.
According to this method, the user who rearranges documents may forget the positions of a document before and after rearrangement during long-time work. Then, he has to search for documents many times during the work, which is very troublesome.
As a measure to avoid such a labor, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-48521 discloses a method of searching for a document to be arranged in a new folder under a plurality of document search conditions, or executing full-text retrieval using a keyword based on the folder name.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 9-128380 discloses a system capable of managing the version of each folder to allow a user to confirm the state of the folder before a change occurs.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-82828 discloses a system which, when data is moved, automatically creates and registers a destination notification/search document in an original folder to notify a user that data has been moved and of the data destination.
However, the method described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-48521 cannot cope with a case in which it is difficult to create a search condition for classifying documents or set an appropriate keyword. This method is beneficial when there is an enormous number of documents and classification errors are permissible to a certain degree. In other cases, however, the user has to manually do the conventional troublesome work, and the method cannot reduce the burden.
The method described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 9-128380 enables a user to confirm the state of a given folder before a change occurs. However, the user cannot easily confirm the current state of a document contained in the folder. Confirming the state of a rearranged document requires a lot of labor as usual.
The method described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-82828 allows a user to easily find out the destination of a document. However, the user cannot easily confirm the source of the document at its destination. Confirming the source folder is still cumbersome.